Pacific Forum

09/16/2026

🌏 Mathias Richter, Resident Vasey Fellow, published a piece in The Interpreter by Lowy Institute discussing Australia's "amnesia" when it comes to the in general as well as its own history in the region.

Richter noted that Australian awareness of the Pacific comes and goes, which is troubling, especially when it comes to its memory of which colonized.

Getting out of this cycle, he asserted, "requires a long-term investment in knowledge and capabilities that empower ordinary Australians to understand and engage with the region beyond moments of crisis or strategic competition."

📖 Read the article:

Australia keeps rediscovering its ignorance of the Pacific region, then forgetting to fix it.

09/16/2026

Pacific Forum Director for Regional Affairs Rob York writes in the Japan Times that President Trump's efforts to restart dialogue with North Korea appear to have more to do with US midterm elections than security conditions on the Korea Peninsula.

📖 Read the article:

Pyongyang’s shifting priorities leave Washington with little leverage.

09/16/2026

"I'm not very optimistic. But at least the first step has got to be talking to each other."

David Santoro, President and CEO of , is quoted by Eric Baculinao, Erin Tan and Mithil Aggarwal in NBC News on why the United States and China face shared risks — and why mutual distrust keeps stalling cooperation on them.

Santoro's assessment is measured on both ends. Competition between Washington and Beijing is inevitable. But there is still room to negotiate, he argues, because the two sides' respective positions "are not necessarily very much entrenched."

That window matters. Positions that are still forming can still be shaped.
"There are still ways that we can better understand each other and hopefully come up with mechanisms so we can better control this emerging technology."

He is candid about the limits. Asked about the prospect of a major agreement in the near term, Santoro said he was "not very optimistic," adding: "I don't know that we will be able to get to a position where we agree on something substantive."

The piece also examines what is driving Beijing's caution — including concern within the Chinese Communist Party that the technology could be turned against the Party itself.

Full article:

Foremost among the threats for Beijing is the risk to the ruling Communist Party, which worries the technology could be weaponized against it.

09/16/2026

If Kim Jong Un meets Donald Trump later this year, one of the most consequential decisions may be who accompanies him.

Donggak Heo — member of the youth advisory group of the Republic of Korea's Ministry of National Defense and nonresident Kelly Fellow at — writes in Foreign Policy on why a fourth Trump–Kim summit may be less about denuclearization than about succession.

Kim Ju Ae, believed to be around 13, has been a visible presence in North Korean state media since November 2022: missile launches, military parades, weapons tests, cultural events, meetings with foreign visitors. In September 2025, Kim took her to Beijing — her first publicly confirmed trip abroad. She remained at the North Korean Embassy during the main diplomatic events, but her presence reinforced her standing as Kim's likely successor.

Heo's central argument is that Kim does not need an agreement for a summit to be useful.

The record supports it. Singapore made Kim the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting U.S. president. The 2019 border meeting made Trump the first U.S. president to step onto North Korean soil. Hanoi ended with no agreement at all. None resolved the nuclear dispute — but the images were invaluable: the leader of a sanctioned and isolated state standing as an apparent equal beside the president of the United States.

What makes this moment different is the gap Heo identifies between formal policy and political reality. Pyongyang's foreign ministry called denuclearization an "irreversibly finalized matter" in June.

The administration continues to support complete denuclearization — while Trump has repeatedly referred to North Korea as a "nuclear power."

If Trump sits down with Kim while Pyongyang refuses to discuss disarmament, the distinction between recognizing North Korea as a nuclear state and negotiating with it as one begins to blur. The practical agenda shifts from when North Korea will surrender its arsenal to what can be negotiated while it keeps it: missile testing, fissile material production, sanctions, exercises, crisis management.

That is much closer to the relationship Pyongyang has spent years trying to build — moving its arsenal from a problem the world expects to eliminate to a strategic fact it must manage.

Bringing Ju Ae would add another layer: associating a prospective fourth-generation heir with the prestige of direct dealings with a U.S. president.

Full piece:

Kim Jong Un may be ready to introduce his daughter on the global stage.

09/16/2026

The Philippines and Vietnam sit on opposite sides of the South China Sea. Their maritime claims overlap. They just upgraded their partnership anyway.

Mico A. Galang, at , writes in Eurasia Review on what the Philippines–Vietnam Enhanced Strategic Partnership signals about Southeast Asian agency in a shifting .

The context: during Vietnamese President Tô Lâm's visit to Manila from 31 May to 1 June 2026, the two countries elevated their decade-old Strategic Partnership as they marked 50 years of diplomatic relations. President Marcos has described Viet Nam as the Philippines' sole Strategic Partner in Southeast Asia.

Three arguments worth reading:

1. This is a tile in a larger design. Marcos calls it a "latticework of partnerships" — Vietnam alongside Japan (elevated to Comprehensive Strategic in 2026), Australia, the ROK, and India, layered over the U.S. alliance rather than substituting for it. At the Observer Research Foundation in August 2025, Marcos set out four criteria for strategic partners: mutual and strategic trust, common cause, clear alignment of interests, and a demonstrated record of responsible behavior in the global commons.

2. Cooperation does not require agreement. Manila and Hanoi remain claimant states with overlapping claims. What they have built instead are mechanisms to manage that: an MoU on Incident Prevention and Management in the South China Sea, an MoU on Maritime Cooperation, and a Coast Guard hotline. The 2026 declaration expands strategic dialogue, information sharing, military education and training, and port visits.

3. ASEAN centrality is reinforced, not undercut. The apparent paradox of two ASEAN members deepening bilateral ties dissolves on inspection. ASEAN's convening power was never designed to address every regional challenge alone. A stronger ASEAN can emerge from member states that are individually more capable and more connected.

Galang's closing point is the one to sit with. Both declarations reaffirm UNCLOS and the 2016 Arbitral Award. But the partnership's value will depend less on the label attached to it than on whether the dialogues, the maritime domain awareness cooperation, the port visits, and the training actually materialize — particularly at a moment when the consistency of American attention to the region cannot be assumed.

Full analysis:

Key Takeaways: The Philippines and Viet Nam have entered a new phase in their bilateral relationship. During Vietnamese President Tô

09/16/2026

"The power was never in the backdoor. It was in being the supplier everyone must return to."

Brad Glosserman, Senior Adviser at , writes in The Japan Times on how the geopolitical divide is being built — not through weapons or treaties, but through standards, stacks, and the quiet accumulation of dependency.

Six years ago, analysts warned of a digital iron curtain. Glosserman prefers a different image: barbells. Two spheres of economic activity, the connections between them growing steadily thinner.

The case study is a technology most people outside China have never heard of. NearLink — also called SparkLink — is a Chinese alternative to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, developed by Huawei after a U.S.-led campaign removed the company from the Wi-Fi Alliance and Bluetooth SIG in 2019. It combines Bluetooth's low power draw with Wi-Fi's throughput, and by most reviews, it is genuinely the better technology.

The numbers to watch:
→ 100M+ devices shipped with NearLink inside, including 12 million smartphones
→ 1,200+ members in the iSLA alliance, with 600 products and 300+ chip and module development boards
→ ITU working groups have accepted China's standardization proposal — full organizational approval is likely, since it is positioned as a complement rather than a replacement
→ A Japanese branch of the alliance was established a year ago, with over a hundred experts from Japanese industry and academia in attendance
Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau of MERICS, whose paper anchors the piece, warns that Europe is "drifting into a new dependence that is more diffuse and harder to detect" — with lock-in effects arriving "long before regulators respond."

The same logic now drives Chinese AI. As Fordham Law's Chinmayi Sharma puts it in Lawfare: "Give the weights away, sell the stack around it, own the dependency." Free at the front, monetized in the middle, reinvested in the stack underneath.

For governments still framing technology risk around backdoors and kill switches, the argument here is that they are watching the wrong thing entirely.

Full piece:

Adoption of particular technologies — reflected to some degree in brands and standards — will determine with which side a country aligns itself.

09/16/2026

Most of the global conversation happens between three capitals. Most of the actual deployment does not.

participated in New America's event on "What Is the Third Path for AI?" — a convening held at the Shangri La, Center for Cultures & Ideas and Museum of Islamic Art, as part of The Shangri La Series.

The premise is a corrective. The global AI debate has organized itself around three "digital empires": the United States, China, and the EU. They matter. But a majority of real-world AI use and experimentation is taking place outside of them.

Middle-income countries — from India to Brazil, from Indonesia to Rwanda — are pursuing their own pathways. Not as followers, but as sites of innovation, experimentation, and cost-effective, high-impact deployment. The governance questions they face are often more immediate and more consequential than those being debated in the capitals that dominate the discussion.

Participation in this kind of convening is also part of what Pacific Forum offers its fellows: direct access to substantive discussions on the issues shaping the region, alongside the practitioners and scholars setting the terms of the debate.

09/16/2026

The pilot program is not the deployment.

Most conversations about AI in defense are still describing what could work. The harder question is what has already been fielded, under real conditions, with measurable results.

The fourth announced theme of the 2027:
Decision Advantage: AI, Data, and the Information Domain

This track examines what has actually shipped:

→ Where have AI, data integration, and decision-support tools already improved operational or strategic decision-making?
→ What real-world deployments — not pilot programs — have demonstrated measurable gains in speed, trust, and decision advantage?
→ How are governments integrating information operations and cognitive warfare tools to counter adversary influence and disinformation campaigns?
→ How are classified, commercial, and allied data streams being brought together to create shared operational and information awareness?
That last question is the structural one. Decision advantage rarely fails because the model is weak. It fails because the data cannot cross the boundaries between agencies, partners, and classification levels fast enough to matter.

is built on a deliberately practical premise: the challenge is no longer identifying solutions, but operationalizing them at speed and scale.

One theme remains.

🗓️ January 18–20, 2027 | 📍 Honolulu, Hawai'i
🔗 honoluludefenseforum.com

09/16/2026

"Workforce development in Hawaiʻi should be treated as critical infrastructure."

Kimberly Lehn, Executive Director and Head of National Security and Defense Programs at , makes the case in Civil Beat for why Hawaiʻi should act on a workforce development moment that will not stay open indefinitely.

The argument is grounded in a gap:

→ Roughly 500,000 U.S. cybersecurity positions sit unfilled
→ In 2022, about 184,000 engineers retired or left the field while only 166,000 graduates entered it
→ More than 65% of defense companies report difficulty hiring qualified workers — and over half say the shortage now threatens contract fulfillment

Hawaiʻi sits at the operational center of the . That position draws real interest from companies well beyond defense. But as Lehn writes, interest alone doesn't build an economy — it has to be met with people who can do the work: engineers, robotics technicians, AI and software specialists, machinists, welders, international relations specialists.
The piece offers three concrete steps:

1. Build out Hawaiʻi's youth apprenticeship network beyond construction trades — into cybersecurity, IT, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.

2. Expand dual-enrollment pathways so high school students can earn credit toward registered apprenticeships and industry credentials before graduation.

3. Launch an "encore workforce" initiative engaging Hawaiʻi's large population of retired military personnel, engineers, and defense professionals as mentors and instructors.

And a standard for measuring success that is worth adopting more widely: not contracts awarded or positions created, but how many Hawaiʻi residents can enter, advance in, and remain in these careers.

🔗 Read the full piece in Civil Beat:

The Indo-Pacific region is home to major military commands but is also a hub for regional diplomacy.

09/15/2026

🗞️ Varuna Shankar, non-resident Vasey Fellow, published a piece in The Diplomat discussing the dispute, brought into the spotlight with the recent visit of Vladimir which protested, and the future of the Japan-Russia relationship.

Shankar noted that "the volcanic islands lie at the heart of a territorial feud that has prevented the two countries from formally ending World War II, despite signing a joint declaration for restoring diplomatic relations in 1956."

She asserted that the dispute has broader implications for the as a whole and that it may be a long-term impetus for greater regional competition.

🔗 Read the full article here:

The Kuril Islands dispute is not just a territorial dispute between Russia and Japan but reflects the larger complexity of geopolitical dynamics in the Indo-Pacific Region.